研討日期

2003年10月4日上午10:00 ~ 下午 1:00

研討地點

經研所二樓社法208教室

討論文獻

題目

作者

文獻出處

Third-degree Price Discrimination in Oligopoly: All-out Competition and Strategic Commitment

Kenneth S. Corts

Rand Journal of Economics, Vol. 29, No. 2, 1998, pp. 306-323

報告人

梁文榮

參加人員

黃鴻、林燕淑、楊雅博、胡均立、吳世傑、吳芝文、郭虹瑩、陳宏易、王光正、邱俊榮、蔡宗秀、李揚、鄭義暉、梁文榮

討論提要

Price discrimination by imperfectly competitive firms may intensify competition, leading to lower prices for all consumers; the tradeoff of consumer groups’ welfare that is characteristic of monopolistic discrimination need not arise. This escalation of competition may make firms worse off, and as a result firms may wish to avoid the discriminatory outcome. Under conditions similar to those in which ambiguous price and welfare effects may arise, unilateral commitment not to price discriminate—including the adoption of everyday low pricing or no-haggle policies—may raise firm profits by softening price competition.

結論

Competitive price discrimination may intensify competition by giving firms more weapons with which to wage their war. Allowing firms to set market-specific prices through discrimination breaks the cross-market profit implications of aggressive price moves that may restrain price competition when firms are limited to uniform pricing. Thus, firms may price more aggressively in some markets when permitted to discriminate; if firms differ in which markets they target for this aggressive pricing and competitive reactions are strong, prices in all market may fall.

Importantly, price discrimination leads to all-out competition only if the discount retailer or the private label is so disadvantaged with respect to the most quality-sensitive market segment that, at the equilibrium uniform prices, it would like to offer that segment a discount. When this holds, the discount retailer or private-label company can’t discriminate when faced with the rival’s uniform price. Consequently, a commitment to uniform pricing by retailer or branded-product company alone suffices to implement the uniform-price equilibrium.

延伸研究

The approach in question may apply to the studies in international trade and spatial competition. We are going to file a study involving endogenous location decision and competitive price discrimination to examine the effect of firms’ location choices on the ability of their price discrimination. In addition, the effects of competitive price discrimination, while considering endogenous location, on the equilibrium price, consumers’ surplus and social welfare are also interesting.

備註